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Anglo-French worldwide rivalry extended to India, where both nations traded through their East India companies. This rivalry, which had led to almost continuous warfare since the 1740s, merged into the rivalry of the Indian powers that were emerging as independent successor states from the breakdown of the Mughal Empire. The Europeans formed alliances with Indian princes. These alliances gave the British and French a potentially commanding influence over some of the Indian states. This influence led to total British control over Bengal in the events that followed the overthrow of the local ruler at the battle of Plassey in 1757. In the south, the British were able to defeat the French, but their position was weaker. Even so, by the end of the war the British East India Company had become a major territorial power in India, closely allied to the British state.

In 1865 the first massive epidemic of cholera occurred in Mecca and caused havoc in various countries of Europe. Brought by the pilgrims, the disease seemed to travel fast and deep into territories that had earlier been sanitarily inviolate. What was seen in many European countries as self-evident and obvious was strongly challenged by the colonial Indian state which took exception to the portrayal of pilgrims from South Asia as disease carriers. The Europeans' desire to stop cholera in its tracks thus faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in the shape of the British Indian state. This chapter explores the differences between these two stands. It examines the commercial dimension of the Haj in detail and its connections with medical measures and disease definitions. It explores the links between subjects such as Indian cholera theories, commerce, and the rise of a public health administration in India.

This chapter examines the Indian state’s relief and rehabilitation policies in West Bengal to argue that, in addition to being a patchwork of contingent and ad hoc solutions, such policies and the public discourse surrounding them constructed a paradoxical figure of the Bengali refugee: heroic but lazy, able to abandon their homeland but parochial about rehabilitation outside the boundaries of West Bengal, an economic migrant under the cloak of a refugee, shorn of agency yet subversive. In the eyes of the Indian State, the refugees from East Pakistan remained a ‘problem child’ whose path to self-reliant citizenship was handicapped not because faulty policies but partly due to the illegitimacy of such claims and partly due to the very ‘nature’ of the Bengali refugee. Such constructions stemmed partly from the official perception Bengal Partition had not entailed large-scale violence and consequently did not warrant permanent migration of refugees who could claim victimhood.

This chapter examines the literature on the changing perception of the social character of the Indian state. It analyses the relevant works of Baldev Raj Nayar, Zoya Hasan, Partha Chatterjee, and Samir Kumar Das, to name a few, and provides an exhaustive overview of the literature relating to the changing profile of the Indian State over the years. The analysis indicates that there is no dominant trend in existing research about the Indian State and that most studies are marked by ‘contradiction’. This chapter also considers the relation between the Indian state and the demands of democracy and highlights the fact that the state in India is yet to attain a hegemonic status.

The introductory chapter discusses the literature on the Indian state during the post-independence period. This volume explores research and writings on issues about political economy, social policy, law, and state of rights, the era of economic reforms and globalization, and analyses their implications on the social character of the Indian state. This chapter also discusses perspectives and approaches considered in the analysis of the Indian state such as institutionalism, state pluralism, and discourse analysis.

This chapter investigates three movements that took place within half a decade of each other — Assam (1985–1992), Punjab (1984–1993), and Jammu and Kashmir (henceforth Kashmir, 1989–1994). It traces how these movements represent the three “hotbed” regions of ethno-national separatism in India. Muslim and Sikh nationalism in Kashmir and Punjab dominated regional, national, and even international headlines for years. The Northeast, meanwhile, has proved problematic for India to placate for decades, and Assam is the central state in the region. The chapter focuses on these cases because of the two basic clusters of secessionist movements in India: immediately after independence, and in the late 1970s through the 1980s. It then zooms in the most populous state in the Northeast of India region — Assam. It characterizes Assam as the “heart of this region” and considers it an apposite window to understand the secessionist conflict in the restive Northeast. Ultimately, the chapter elaborates on the interaction between the Indian state and Sikh nationalists in the 1980s as well as the crisis in Kashmir, set off by a fraudulent election in 1987, which pushed Kashmiri nationalists to launch a secessionist struggle.

This chapter examines why the Pakistani state was so much more indiscriminate and extreme in its use of violence against Bengali secessionists in 1971 than Baloch secessionists three years later. It reveals that the primary reason for the variation in state strategy was the perceived differential in third-party support. The chapter then details how the Bengali movement was deemed to be operating hand-in-glove with the Indian state, while by contrast, the Baloch only received sanctuary from Afghanistan. This distinction between moderate and high levels of third-party support meant that the Bengali movement was deemed a much more significant threat to Pakistan's external security than the Baloch movement was. The chapter also looks at the decision makers and soldiers on the ground who were more aggressive and violent in East Pakistan than they were in Balochistan. It recounts Bangladesh's hard-won freedom from Pakistan and explores how it resulted in significant political instability.

This chapter examines research and literature about the history of the political economy of the Indian state. It explores how the left-leaning scholarship has seriously constrained the state’s welfare and redistributive capacities. It discusses how a structuralist understanding of the state as predominantly determined by the logic of capitalist development has been widely shared by this genre of scholars. It also highlights the emergence of the state as the protector of corporate capital in the name of development and the latter as the most powerful shaper of state policies.

This chapter examines the history of civil society activism in India and its link to the international/global civil society. It describes the civil society movements in India including the emergence of new social movements, non-governmental organizations, and the ‘uncivil’ elements in the civil society since 1990. It explains that the new social movements and other civil society organizations in India operated in the same way as their counterparts in other countries because of their refusal to be co-opted by the Indian state.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Indian state, Muslim nonstate actors, and the inherent relationship between religion, secularity, and human security. It focuses on Muslim activists and secular leaders in western India, particularly on Mumbai and Gujarat where, in recent decades, targeted attacks on Muslims have occurred. In fact, in both these cases, the state has been indicted for its complicity in the violence. These events and their aftermaths provide a window through which we can observe nonstate Muslim activists directly contesting with the state for the sake of increased human security. Human security includes the provision of welfare, human rights, and a socially subjective view of human autonomy. Because of a large Muslim population, the Indian state cannot limit its jurisdiction to the protection of property. It must also include the defense of Muslim rights as well as the recognition of Muslims' social and subjective desires for self-expression and autonomy.

The concluding chapter discusses several of the main arguments and results that were presented in the previous chapters. It looks at their implications on the broader literature for pro-poor politics, as well as for politics in other Indian states. The chapter starts with a recollection of the basic results in terms of the original research hypotheses. It then moves on to a discussion on the implications of the arguments found in this book. The extent to which these results can be used to improve an understanding of state politics in other Indian states is studied as well. The final section in the chapter focuses on the possible areas for future research and where the methods used in this book can also be applied.

This introductory chapter assesses state capacity in India. There is little question, as many boosters of India's rise have argued, that the Indian state has exhibited considerable ability to tackle diverse challenges since its emergence from the collapse of the British Indian Empire. It has, for the most part, successfully fended off external challenges to its territorial integrity; it has worn down a series of secessionist insurgencies and has managed to cope with the many fissiparous tendencies of ethnic, class, and religious cleavages that some analysts thought would tear the country apart in the 1960s. However, state capacity remains paradoxical in India. India does not possess a weak state, but neither does it have a strong state. Its state capacity falls in between the conventional weak-strong continuum. As a consequence, the Indian state manifests both strengths and weakness, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently.

This book has tried to show the significant connections between Indian social service practices and the wider world of ‘public politics’, nation-building, and nationalism in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The author lists his conclusions as being the crucial relationship between an active citizenry and a vibrant public life; the establishment of the belief that the creation of healthy students make for more patriotic citizens; the overlap of Indian and global notions of charity and philanthropy; the creation of national solidarity through social service movements; their tacit support of the political activities of the Congress party; and their contribution to the slow de-legitimizing of the colonial state. The author ends by stating that there is no direct link between the social service practices of the 1910s and 21st century Indian civil society (with its vibrant NGO sector) which is completely different.

Examining research and literature on the social policy of the Indian State, this chapter focuses on education reform and employment guarantee. It analyses the tensions and conflicts associated with social policies in India and its political context. It also evaluates the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and suggests that the scheme has enabled the rural poor to take some risks which could not have been possible if they were entirely dependent on subsistence agriculture. This chapter also highlights the significant transformation of the concept of welfare in recent years.

This chapter focuses on Collier and the US Indian Service (IS). Collier brought applied anthology into the Indian Service so as to develop culturally appropriate policies—an innovation he claimed was inspired by what he saw in Mexico. Collier drew on examples of indirect colonial rule, including Spanish colonialism in New Spain, to further a scientific democratic governance of cultural and racial differences. Collier and others sought to promote and use democratic forms of Native leadership. During and after the Second World War, Collier, along with Laura Thompson and other academics, extended what they had learned regarding the management of ethnic difference to the Japanese-American internment camp at Poston, Arizona, which was run by the Indian Service, and, later, to U.S. “dependencies” abroad and “minorities” at home. This chapter charts the shift toward a more universalizing view of modernization and its application to diverse groups.

This chapter reports the active presence of the Indian state in the resettlement process. It is shown that state apparatus is not necessarily a congruent and coordinated unit but rather a conglomeration of various governmental agencies working autonomously towards common goals. The resettlement of the Partition refugees was the first challenge before the newly independent state. Class divisions continued from the last journeys into the transit refugee camps and the permanent housing projects. This chapter focuses on the spatial competition between the state and the migrants. The role of the state in the urban expansion of Delhi became more pronounced when it started its project of providing permanent resettlement to the refugees. The resettlement process separated the owners of capital (of any kind) from the non-owners.

This chapter discusses the transition of Hindu law to postmodernity. This change of Hindu law is charted through an analysis of different processes of society-state interactions in post-colonial India. It also identifies the role of judicial activity as critical in shaping this development, particularly in following the constitutional crisis of legitimacy of the modern Indian state and its desperate and draconian attempts.

This chapter considers a treaty of peace at Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814 by American and British commissioners. Initially, the British had insisted on creation of a permanent and semi-independent Indian buffer state north of the line drawn by the Treaty of Greenville, within which the United States would be forever barred from demanding further cessions of land. The American commissioners absolutely refused to consider such a proposal, and the British, weary of war after twenty years fighting against the power of Napoleonic France, yielded. Instead, they were able to obtain only a face-saving provision, Article IX of the treaty, which guaranteed their Indian allies all the possessions, rights, and privileges they may have enjoyed, or been entitled to, in 1811, provided they ceased hostilities against the United States.

This chapter examines research and literature on the role of law and rights in Indian state. It discusses the writings about issues such as judicial activism, violation and assertion of rights, the role of law as an instrument of social transformation, and debates about the Constitution. While the state looks upon the issue of rights in more managerial terms, the more intractable rights claims that spark off tumultuous democratic politics and threaten to disrupt the constitutional order continues to exist. This chapter also considers the government’s Unique Identification Number Project (UIDNP) and the nationalization of private enterprises intended to create a socialistic pattern of society.